‘Godmother of Cocaine’ assassinated in Colombia

A RUTHLESS drug boss thought to have had dozens of people murdered during her reign as Miami’s ‘Godmother of Cocaine’ has been shot dead.

Griselda Blanco, 69, was hit twice in the head by a motorcycle-riding assassin as she left a butcher’s shop in her home town of Medellin, ­Colombia.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Blanco was a leading figure in the Miami drug wars that saw thousands of kilos of cocaine smuggled into the city every month and tens of millions of dollars changing hands as it was distributed through her US network of dealers.

As head of her own cartel, Blanco ordered scores of hits and attacks but was convicted of only three killings, two dealers who crossed her and the two-year-old son of a former henchman who insulted her son.

She had led a quiet life in Colombia since being deported from the US in 2004, after serving almost two decades in jail in New York and Florida for racketeering and murder.

Experts say her demise was fitting for a woman credited with inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing when in control of the Miami cocaine trade.

“What goes around comes around,” said Professor Bruce Bagley, head of the University of Miami’s department of International Studies. “She made a lot of enemies and was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of people. It’s some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others. She wasn’t anything like the player she was in her early days but she had lingering enemies almost everywhere you look.”

Blanco rose to prominence as cocaine supplanted marijuana as the most profitable drug to smuggle through Miami during the 1970s. Her distribution network netted her tens of millions of dollars a month for each shipment of more than 1,500kg, and she maintained her dominance by building an empire staffed with brutal enforcers. She was also involved in developing methods to get the cocaine into the US, setting up a lingerie shop in Colombia that produced underwear for export with secret compartments.

Her story, as featured in the 2008 documentary Cocaine Cowboys: Hustlin’ with the Godmother, showed that her love of the underworld was not limited to drugs. One son was christened Michael Corleone Blanco after the central figure in the Godfather trilogy of movies. Two of her three other sons by her first husband were murdered.

Blanco also lost three husbands, and was suspected in the deaths of them all. She confronted then-husband and business partner Alberto Bravo in a Bogota nightclub car park in 1975 over millions of dollars missing from the cartel they built together. Blanco, then 32, pulled out a pistol, Bravo produced an Uzi sub-machine gun and after a firefight he and six bodyguards lay dead. Blanco, suffered only a minor gunshot to the stomach, recovered and moved to Miami.

In Florida she was blamed for between 40 and 200. The most prominent was Johnny Castro, two, shot twice in the head by hitmen as he travelled in his father’s car. “At first she was real mad because we missed the father, but when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even,” Blanco’s former lieutenant, Jorge Ayala, told police.